ABOUT THE ROLE

This is an open application for expressions of interest. Active recruitment for the role will begin in Q4 2024.

At DSV we’re looking for future Founders, entrepreneurially minded individuals with industry-specific technical and commercial domain expertise who are eager to solve urgent unmet challenges through venture building.

You will join DSV’s venture creation programme as a Co-Founder in Residence and work closely with the DSV team, using our methodology, to spin-out a new company. During the programme, you’ll work on all aspects related to venture creation in this opportunity area, including working out the optimal approach to solve for the desired outcome, building a team and building a viable business case. Once the new venture is incorporated with pre-seed investment from DSV, you and your co-founders will own the majority stake in the business and continue receiving support from the DSV team post-spinout.

The role is full-time and fully remote until venture incorporation and spin-out.

THE OPPORTUNITY AREA
Over 6 million individuals live with Parkinson’s today, and this number is projected to reach 12 million globally by 2040 as populations age. Whilst current therapies do offer symptomatic relief from debilitating cognitive and motor symptoms, no clinically approved drug intervenes at root cause, meaning disease progression cannot be prevented. In addition, emerging therapeutics which show great promise in animal models often fail to translate in the clinical setting, with even the most successful clinical trials reporting incremental benefit, often capped by dose limiting toxicity.

To address this, we are partnering with Parkinson’s UK to develop precise, next generation therapies which target true disease modifying nodes in previously unimagined ways. As Parkinson's is a multi-pathway pathology, spanning oxidative stress, impaired autophagy, mitochondrial dysfunction and neuroinflammation, the efficacy of single pathway approaches is constrained. Therefore, we will target master homeostatic regulators which can simultaneously correct numerous impaired pathways, changing disease course. We believe this has the potential to transform patient lives by slowing, halting or even reversing disease progression.